PORT HURON, Michigan — People in the media, the Republican establishment, and the Democratic Party who still don’t understand the new conservative populist coalition that is today’s Republican Party (and who don’t care to try) often speculate what the GOP will look and act like after Donald J. Trump is no longer president.
Does it continue in his brash mold? Does it return to the more buttoned-down moderate frame of Mitt Romney?
Or will it chart a path somewhere in between, following the likes of Nikki Haley or Florida Sen. Rick Scott?
To investigate this question, the first rule is: Do not look on Twitter, where politics is totally unrepresentative of the country as a whole.
There are two better places to look: first with the voters and second with the candidates willing to run for House seats in a cycle where no one expects them to take the majority. These local politicians are comfortable not just navigating this coalition that is now the Republican Party but are also authentic in living and representing their values.
Shane Hernandez is one of those candidates. The 37-year-old state representative who grew up in Croswell, a small agricultural town 25 miles north of here, announced two weeks ago he will be running for Michigan’s 10th Congressional District, seeking a seat held by Republican Paul Mitchell, who is retiring after two terms.
The district is in Michigan’s “thumb,” which includes northern Macomb County as well as Lapeer, Sanilac, St. Clair, Huron, and Tuscola counties. It’s Trump Country, and Mitchell and Trump both won here easily. Recently, retired Air Force Gen. Doug Slocum also entered the GOP primary race.
“When I was a kid, there were two main businesses,” Hernandez explained. “You had the pickle factory, which was a seasonal summer job, and then you had the sugar beet factory, which was a seasonal winter job,” he said.
His parents started out with a steep hill to climb, Hernandez said. “My dad actually was kicked out of school in ninth grade, and he eventually got his high school diploma through a night school program. He married my mom on spring break of her senior year.”
Hernandez grew up in a Democratic family. “My dad was lifelong Democrat. He was the president at his local union at his plant. And for whatever reason, I have one brother. He’s five years older than me, and he decided he was a Republican. And I wanted to be like my older brother, and it drove my dad nuts. So, I think the two of us just enjoyed it, poking and prodding at him.”
The root of his conservatism, as an adversarial stance, helps you understand the spine he has shown in staying a conservative when culture, academia, and peers take daily potshots at the belief system.
“The more I spent in a university setting and studying architecture (and my master’s degree is even focused on sustainability and green architecture) that really drove me to really dig in and make sure I was strong in my beliefs. I could argue them. I understood the other side, and so I did,” he said.
His father, who worked at the pickle plant for 26 years, eventually found his way over to the “other side.” As Hernandez explains it, the evolution became complete when his father realized he had achieved the American dream on his own.
“I remember he had several things that he was hung up on. … We were low income, and his understanding of politics was: ‘You’re low income, you have to be a Democrat.’ He was a minority, and his understanding is: ‘If you’re a minority, you have to be a Democrat.’ And he was a union guy, and his understanding is: ‘If you’re a union guy, you have to be a Democrat.’”
Sometimes, people are just born into a party. You are who your parents and grandparents were. It’s not all that different from religion. These days, political association has replaced religion for many people.
Yet the path for elected officials in this new GOP may lie in people who took a harder road to get there, people such as Hernandez who had to figure out on their own how to stand up for their principles when it wasn’t exactly the coolest or most popular thing to do.
